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Appiah issues 'cosmopolitan challenge' to freshmen

Posted September 13, 2005; 12:35 p.m.

by Eric Quiñones

Not long after being welcomed to the Princeton campus, members of
the class of 2009 were exhorted by one of the world's leading
philosophers to look beyond their new surroundings to examine and
uphold their obligations to fellow citizens of the world.

"You may or may not like strangers or their ways. But the very essence
of morality requires that you should accept that we have a shared
responsibility for the human fate," Princeton professor Kwame Anthony
Appiah said in delivering the annual Freshman Assembly lecture on
Sunday, Sept. 11, in McCarter Theatre.

Appiah's talk, "Challenges to Cosmopolitanism," explored a concept that
dates back to the fourth century B.C., when Greek philosophers known as
the Cynics coined the term cosmopolitan, meaning "citizen of the
cosmos." Their theory signaled "a rejection of the conventional view
that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities,"
he said.

In the cosmopolitan view, people must care for and try to understand
others "beyond those with whom we are related by the ties of family or
even the more formal ties of a shared citizenship," Appiah said. It is
imperative, he added, "that we take seriously the value not just of
human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an
interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance.

"People are different, the cosmopolitan knows, and there is much to
learn from our differences. Because there are so many human
possibilities worth exploring, we neither expect nor desire that every
person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.
Whatever our obligations are to others (or theirs to us) they often
have the right to go their own way," Appiah said.

"As we'll see, there will be times when these two ideals -- universal
concern and respect for legitimate difference -- clash. There's a sense
in which cosmopolitanism is the name not of the solution but of the
challenge," he said.

Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy
and the University Center for Human Values, specializes in moral and
political philosophy, African and African-American studies, and issues
of personal and political identity, multiculturalism and nationalism.
He is the author of numerous award-winning books, including "The Ethics
of Identity" and "Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race." His
next book, "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," will be
published in 2006. Last year, the French-language weekly news magazine
Le Nouvel Observateur named Appiah one of the 25 greatest thinkers in
the world today.

His talk followed the official welcoming of the new students at Opening
Exercises earlier in the day. The assembly is intended to give freshmen
their first taste of academic life at Princeton. The lecture was
followed by small discussion groups, the same format that many of their
classes will take.

In his talk, Appiah described two breeds of enemies of
cosmopolitanism: "those who deny the legitimacy of universality and
those who deny the legitimacy of difference."

Noting that it was
particularly important to examine these issues on the anniversary of
the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks against the United States, Appiah
cited the deadly religious intolerance of fundamentalist Muslims, such
as Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and fundamentalist Christians, such as
the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph. While emphasizing that
they are in the minority of those who share their faiths, Appiah
stressed that their views oppose the cosmopolitan commitment to
pluralism.

"Cosmopolitans think that there are many values worth
living by and that you cannot live by all of them. So we hope and
expect that different people and different societies will embody and
experiment with different values, though they have to be values worth
living by," he said. "Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what
philosophers call fallibilism. We have the sense that our knowledge is
imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence
-- including new evidence from people in other societies."

In
addition to addressing theoretical issues, Appiah urged students to
apply the tenets of cosmopolitanism to real-world problems. He
challenged them to think about the need for increased international aid
from wealthy nations, given the poverty and health crises in the Third
World. While America has the largest foreign aid budget in the world,
its foreign aid as a percentage of gross domestic product is the lowest
among affluent nations, he noted.

"Charitable giving in the wake
of the tsunami of Christmas 2004 was remarkable and heartening; but 2
million people die each year of malaria; 240,000 a month die of AIDS;
and 136,000 [a month] die of diarrhea, most of them children," he said.

In
2002, the United Nations organized a summit on international aid in
Monterrey, Mexico, which Appiah called "a truly cosmopolitan
conversation on a matter of central cosmopolitan concern."

"It's
important that conversations like these continue; it's even more
important that they don't just end with conversation," he said. "For if
there are people without their basic entitlements -- and there are
billions of them -- we know that, collectively, we are not meeting our
obligations."

Following Appiah's lecture, freshman Yume
Kitasei said she appreciated that he supported his message of tolerance
with "concrete details about how we can apply this in the real world."

"He
had suggestions for what we should pursue as per Princeton's motto,"
she said, referring to the University's informal motto of "Princeton in
the nation's service and in the service of all nations."

Kitasei
added that Appiah's wide-ranging address was an excellent introduction
to academics at Princeton. "I thought this was a great lecture," she
said, "and it also was good practice for my note-taking."